


Rising Flood

by rosegardeninwinter



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 11:21:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15795465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosegardeninwinter/pseuds/rosegardeninwinter
Summary: "Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Victors of the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games: Finnick Odair and Annie Cresta!"





	Rising Flood

The main thing, Mags told them, is to keep your head above water. Could she have known how literal her words would prove to be? 

Water is rising, rising, rising and the top of the dome is coming closer. They’re in the sky and the whole world is ocean. 

They want a victor and she’s ready to give it to them. Let Finnick go home. The sea is where she was born and where she will die. Not too bad an ending. 

But he won’t have it. He won’t let her. He clings to her, forces her head up above the waves. 

“They don’t have to have a winner,” he says. “Annie. They don’t.” 

There was something awful in his eyes, but she didn’t remember it till after. 

“On three?”

“On three.” 

Neck under, mouth under, eyes under, dark. Coolness pressing against her eyes. 

They float as though on air—limbs twisted, hair spread like paper fans—down, down, so softly, down.

Then up again, metal clamping around them. A gasp of air, engines whirring, trumpets blaring. “Ladies and Gentlemen — !” 

It’s funny. For a few glorious months, they’d thought it was over. 

There’s a television on the Victory Train. They see the trident symbol on a piece of cardboard, suspended above a young rioter’s head, see it riddled with bullet holes. 

Annie wakes up to the sound of Finnick crying in his sleep and she runs down the hall to hold him. 

* * *

Her name is Katniss, the darling of the Capitol, the “Girl on Fire.” She deserves the moniker, Finnick decides. Her gaze, appraising him from across the chariots, is blazing, deadly. 

She is a force to be reckoned with. 

He’s diving for a trident at the Cornucopia when another tribute pounces in front of him, a knife clutched in her hand. An arrow lodges in her neck before Finnick has time to react. 

“Good thing we’re allies, right?” Katniss says. 

He doesn’t trust her though, not until she saves Annie hours later. He doesn’t know the first thing about treating burns but she’s a miner’s daughter. She knows too well. 

The birds are programmed to make the sounds, but that doesn’t stop him running into the trees after the sound of Mags—dear old Mags, practically his mother—screaming his name in terror.

Katniss comes tearing after him, fury in her voice, “What are you—?” 

But she never finishes, because the siren song has begun again. The color drains from her dark features and she sprints through the underbrush in a panic. 

Afterward, he sits by the water, Annie stroking his hair, murmuring comfort as the waves lap around their feet. Johanna comes to sit by them.

“Who’s Peeta?” 

“Peeta Mellark, the boy Haymitch volunteered for?” 

(Finnick clears his throat at the mention of the man who gave himself up to the poison fog to let them escape.)

“He won the games a couple of years after Katniss did,” Johanna says. 

“Is he,” Annie says, with a glance behind her at the tree in which Katniss is perched, gazing blankly at the sunset, “Is he the one that went a little—?”

Johanna nods, then heaves a deep sigh. “Love is weird.”

* * *

It’s midnight and his eyes are strained past their breaking point. Katniss sits beside him on the camp bed, fiddling with a small, round object between her fingers. 

“What’s that?” he asks her, wrapping his thumb through the loop of the rope he’s tying. 

“Pearl,” is her response. “Keeps him close.” 

“Oh,” he says and that’s all that passes between them until Mags signals for them to come to the hospital.

Everything is a haze of bright lights. At one point he spots Johanna, sidling past with a cloth pressed against her bleeding forehead and she smirks in his direction as if to say “you’re welcome.” 

He starts towards her, to thank her, overjoyed at the notion of seeing Annie again, but his path is blocked by a pale man in hospital pajamas, hands bandaged. 

“Katniss?” the man cries disbelievingly. “Katniss!” And he’s sprinting towards her. 

The steely eyes of the girl Finnick once feared calling his ally light up silver. “Peeta!” 

In less than a second it seems, the space has crumpled to accommodate only them. They crash, entwine, losing their balance and tumbling to the floor where they stay, shaking and crying, one being.

A twinge of envy stings him. No one seeing them now could doubt their love. Can he say the same for himself and Annie? 

A few moments later, when Annie—sweet, gentle Annie—flings herself at him and tries to stab him with a syringe, he has his answer.

* * *

“You just have to be patient with her,” Katniss says over dinner one evening. Peeta is mushing his stew distractedly and Katniss leans over to whisper in his ear, kiss his temple, once, twice. He blinks and smiles at her, starts eating properly. 

He’s not the sort of mad Finnick was expecting, Peeta. He’s cognizant most of the time, kind and funny. Sometimes though, he’ll drop out of conversations abruptly, staring intently at scenes only he can see. Sometimes he’ll moan and clench his fingers in his hair and shake his head as though to clear his ears of water. Okay, he’s strange, but Katniss adores him, and that’s enough for Finnick. 

Be patient with Annie. He wants to listen to her advice. He wants to believe that all it will take is some patience, to draw the girl from home out of this hysterical creature she’s become, convinced that he is responsible for the destruction of their district. 

To be fair to her, she’s not wrong on that point.

* * *

He goes to 2. He gets shot. His suit protects him; he is only bruised. What hurts more is the memory that comes swimming up through the drugs. 

He is floating on his back and the sky above him is golden. It’s a peaceful place, full of the salt scent of the ocean. The hem of a dress skims over the water by his head, a hand brushes against his hair. Annie, wading through the tide beside him. 

“Don’t leave me,” he’d pleaded with her one night on the train, the image of the dead man in 11 burned in his brain. 

Her voice had been soft when she’d answered but her eyes were fiery. “Never.” 

He jerks up in the water, scrabbling for her hand, but there is nothing. Only the hospital bed on which he lies.

Never.

It taunts him now.

* * *

“I’m about to orchestrate an entertainment propo that’s sure to be popular, ” Finnick barely hears in the background as he and Plutarch take an elevator to Command, “everyone loves a wedding.” 

This stops him rigid. “What?” he snaps. What are they planning? He hasn’t seen Annie since he returned from 2 and Mags hasn’t spoken to him much on the subject of her treatment. They’re trying any number of methods, but she’ll never be the same again and now — ? 

“Absolutely not,” he says, but Plutarch is rushing to assure him. 

“Not your wedding, Finnick,” he says. “No, no. Katniss and Peeta’s.” 

“Oh.” Then he brightens. “Oh that’s good. That’s great.”

“All you need to do is show up and pretend to be happy for them.”

He smiles. “I won’t need to pretend,” he says.

* * *

The ceremony is different to what is done in 4, with a bridal net and traditional promises. Instead there is a bread toasting and personal vows.

He was right about not having to pretend to be happy. It’s no lavish affair, certainly not what Plutarch probably had in mind, but Finnick thinks it’s perfect.

Peeta is lucid and tender. Katniss seems transformed. They don’t have anything in the way of a wedding dress for her, but she is beautiful with a circlet of periwinkles crowning her braided hair. 

There’s dancing afterwards, a fiddle and tambourine. He doesn’t have to be prodded to join in with Mags and the rest. 

At one moment, he gets the chance to dance with Katniss. 

“Congratulations,” he says. 

“Thank you.” 

“Did your sister make that circlet?”

Katniss hesitates for a moment before replying. “No. Annie did.”

Suddenly he doesn’t want to dance anymore.

* * *

“Finnick,” Annie says, “I remember about the storm.” She remembers him stumbling sideways through the wind and the lashing rain, bleeding and confused. She remembers running out to him, dragging him to the safety of the family storm shelter, bandaging his head. 

“They said I loved you,” she says. She can’t think why she ever would love him, but that is what they said.

“You did,” he says and her mouth tastes bad at the words. Salt water. 

“Did you love me?” 

He doesn’t give her a straight answer. 

Her head hurts so badly.

* * *

He is so angry he can barely breathe. Coin wants him dead (wants them both dead). Why else would she send Annie to the front lines?

“Be patient,” he hears Mags telling him, hears Katniss echoing. Katniss, who is here on what should be her honeymoon. It’s guilt about this fact that drives him to speak to Annie one night on watch. 

“I can’t tell,” she mutters after a few moments’ pitiful attempts at conversation, “what’s a made up memory and what’s real…” 

Katniss shifts around in her sleeping bag. “Then you should ask, Annie. It’s what Peeta does. There’s this game we play. You just ask a question and one of us will tell you if it’s real or not real.” 

“Your favorite color,” Annie says at last, turning to him, “is pink. Real or not real?” 

He thinks of the dress they buried his mother in, the one she loved best, and of summer flowers in the market, and of dawn blushing up over the sea. 

“Real,” he says, and then, a bit painfully, “Yours is gray. Like heather or a rainy sky.” 

“Oh,” she says. Her red hair falls about her face as she hunches over, gazes wearily at the shackles on her willowy wrists. “Thank you.”

It all comes pouring out so quickly he can’t stop it. “You’re a basket weaver. You’re a swimmer. You like to collect shells. You play the mandolin. You have a scar on your foot from when you were two and you love the taste of ginger,” he says and then he gets up and switches watch before he can cry.

* * *

“Finnick!” Katniss is shouting commandingly and she’s shoving him up the ladder, up towards the light. The mutts are tearing at her, blood coloring the water as she slashes at them with a knife, divested of her bow and gun. “Finnick, go!” 

He hauls himself up, blind with terror, reaches the top and whirls around to pull her up. She is struggling for the ladder. “Finnick!” It sounds like a plea. He’s too far away, he can’t help her. 

“Katniss!” he cries. 

One of the mutts lunges, yanks Katniss's head back to deliver the killing blow and suddenly it is as though he is Katniss, watching images flick swiftly by. Pine trees, a coal fire, Haymitch laughing raucously, a quiver of arrows, Peeta’s blue eyes, a bird taking flight over a meadow of primroses. 

Then it’s over. 

(If only it were over.) 

* * *

It’s almost certainly suicide but he does the only thing he can think of. Annie’s mouth trembles as he kisses her. 

“Don’t let him take you from me.” 

“I don’t want to,” she whimpers. 

“Don’t leave me,” he begs. 

Her eyes clear. “Never.” 

He takes her hand. They run.

* * *

Snow is the only one who knows why Finnick hurls his trident through Coin’s ribcage. He is locked in a room for days. 

Fine. Let him die here. 

He doesn’t care.

Katniss is dead. Annie wouldn’t let him kill himself. Mags is out there trying to save his life. 

Don’t bother. 

He’s in the sky and the whole world is ocean. 

* * *

They let him go. Send him back to 4. His house is too lonely. He forgets to eat. He forgets to sleep. 

Mags tries to help him, but she is old and he is stubborn. 

It’s as though he’s waiting for something.

* * *

They let her go. Send her back to 4. She won’t ever be the same Annie, but she won’t ever be the same creature either. She finds him. She coaxes him to eat. She holds his hand and leads him to the water. 

He starts to come back to life. 

They make a book of all the things it would be a crime to forget. Primrose Everdeen sends photos of where she has taken Peeta to live. 

_He’ll be loved_ , she writes. _I’m taking good care of him. I don’t think he’ll ever really be alright, though._

(the writing becomes unsteady here) 

_He needs my sister._

* * *

__

They grow back together. There are still moments when she braces herself in a doorframe until the episode passes. He still wakes screaming from nightmares of mutts and drowning. But her arms are there to soothe him, and one day, her lips. 

__

And one night, he suddenly realizes that he is no longer unsure. He needs her, as much as Peeta needed Katniss. He needs sunlight and the water and the heathery gray of a quiet afternoon. The promise that life can go on, no matter how rough the storm. That it can—and will—be good again. Annie, and Annie alone, can give him that. 

__

So when they curl on the cooling sand, the waves at their toes and eyes full of summer stars, and she whispers, “You love me? Real or not real?”

__

He doesn’t even hesitate.

__


End file.
